I’m trying to understand the other side of the argument. I truly am. I don’t believe that any sane person can witness the latest carnage of school children and say the status quo is acceptable.
Which means every sane person agrees that *something* has to change.
I can only imagine three outcomes to the current national debate. The first is to put armed officials in and around our schools to defend the students against all attackers. The second is to put meaningful restrictions on the right of American citizens to bear arms. The third is some combination of the two.
I think most sane people would agree that, regardless of which outcome our elected representatives decide upon, we need to make further changes if we’re to create a meaningful reduction in *attempted* schoolhouse shootings.
Because this is not just about whether we should or should not restrict the private ownership of guns. It’s also about whatever it is that creates angry, young, white men.
I’m not talking about the stereotypical Trump voter or the horrifying rise of white nationalism (which, for the record, is horrible because, in this nation, whites already possess the majority, so all white nationalism can do is further oppress the oppressed, as opposed to black nationalism, which is more about a rising up, rather than a pushing down, but I digress…).
I’m talking about the angry, young, white men who sit back and strategize the optimum method for murdering their peers, and then have the discipline and wherewithal to follow through with their plan.
These are not children acting on a whim.
Last week, in my hometown, the police arrested an angry, young, white man for attempted aggravated murder, attempted first-degree murder, and attempted aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. He had been planning for weeks, if not months, to go into his former high school and just start shooting. He was not arrested on his way to do the act. He had let his plan slip to some of his peers, and he called an old classmate of his who happened to be in the Parkland school last week when the shooting happened, and he asked her to describe to him in detail exactly what happened in the school. It was partly based on this phone call, and because an observant mother of one of his peers, that the boy was arrested before he could act.
The boy confessed to planning the massacre, and he told the police there wasn’t anything they could do to stop it. If he got out of jail, he was going to try again.
Right now, the motive seems shady at best — there may have been some bullying, but it’s not exactly clear from the public evidence — but it’s not even the motive that I want to talk about.
It’s the planning. We saw it at Columbine, at Newtown, and at Parkland. It’s the weeks and months of planning.
These things take time. They take price comparisons for weapons, repeated forays for target practice, and pages and pages of writings or hours and hours of video.
But it’s not just the planning. It’s that moment, weeks or months prior, when they decide they’re going to plan. What was perhaps once a flight of fancy becomes a conscious and deliberate plan.
Why?
The flight of fancy comes, I think, from the media. I don’t doubt that violent movies and violent video games give us permission to more vividly imagine our most violent thoughts, thoughts provoked by current and past events in our collective history, which allows perhaps once forbidden thoughts to become palatable to our moral sensibilities, themselves shaped by generational changes in the processes of parenting, education, and the worship of religion.
But none of those things cause a flight of fancy to suddenly transform into a conscious and deliberate plan.
So what does? What makes imaginary violence turn real?
In one short story I wrote for grad school, my angry, young, white, male protagonist dragged a white pregnant woman guns-a-blazing into a hospital where he forced a doctor to oversee the birth of the woman’s child, all while fighting off a swat team of police. When the child is born with black skin, the protagonist looks at the woman disappointingly, then shoots the baby in the face.
(PS: My advisor that semester was black, and I valued his opinion immensely).
There’s a lot of psychology in that story (especially when I think back to how much of it was written on a whim), but at no point during or after the writing of that story have I ever worried about whether I would enact such violence. The very notion of it is unthinkable to me, despite my ability to imagine it in emotionally resonant detail.
Why did my objectively horrible flight of fancy not turn into a conscious and deliberate plan? What, in my own upbringing, did my family, my society, my culture get right?
It wasn’t respect. My style of conversation can be incredibly disrespectful, turning sharp and personal in sometimes selfishly obtuse ways, and I’m not immune to lashing out physically at those who annoy me.
It wasn’t hard work either. Ask anyone, I’m among the laziest people they know.
It wasn’t discipline. I disobeyed my mother and father plenty during childhood, and I continue to disobey them in many ways today. The detentions and in-school suspensions I received in high school didn’t deter me from doing the same things over and over. The failing grades, the high-interest credit cards, the obscene student loan debt — there’s virtually no discipline here.
But something, *something,* stops me from turning my violent flights of fancy into a conscious and deliberate plan.
It’s not fear. As an atheist, I like to think of myself as relatively impervious to fear. Oh, there’s anxiety galore, but anxiety is not fear. As a child who grew up with an insane phobia of dogs, I’ve known true fear, and fear does not stop me from turning violent thoughts into violent actions.
So what is it?
Whatever it is. That’s what we need to work on in our children.
We don’t need to remove violent video games or stop production on violent movies. Rap, punk, heavy metal: none of them can cause a child to deliberately plan and carry out a massacre. Our ability to imagine violence is not the problem, and if we remove it from our media, all we’ll do is perpetuate oppression, violence being a sometimes necessary response to oppression, and thus being sometimes necessary to imagine.
Nor do we need to put God back in the schools. I live my existence without the fear of God and without the lived sense of His mercy, and yet still, I don’t plan and deliver a hellfire of violence upon the innocents of the world. God may be good, but He’s not good for everybody; whatsmore, He’s definitely not necessary.
So what is it then? What do we need to change in these angry, young, white men? They don’t need more respect, more discipline, more fear, or more God, and they don’t need to reduce their consumption of violent media. None of those things are required to *not* turn their flights of fancy into real, deliberate violence.
But what is?
The answer is so simple I didn’t even notice it until now, even though I’ve shared posts about all throughout the past week.
We simply need to turn angry, young, white men into plain young, white men.
Stop the anger, and you stop the massacre of the innocents.